Learning Is Local

Individual and Community Thriving are Mutually Reinforcing 

Beverly Leon, Founder Local Civics

When Beverley Leon launched Local Civics, she started with a simple question: "How do we lower the barriers for young people to engage in their communities?" But she quickly discovered a harder problem: proving that civic engagement counts as real learning.

The answer matters because what gets measured gets valued. And right now, our education system measures falls short on recognizing many skills democracy requires.

Case in point: Leon describes a group of Bronx seniors who spent months tackling parent engagement. They interviewed multilingual parents, discovered that language barriers prevented families from following their children's academic progress, and worked through three failed solutions before creating a multilingual course guide that actually worked. "It took them three iterations to arrive at where they could even start to tackle this challenge," Leon explains. But here's the problem: how do we document the learning that happened in that process? "There's no defined curriculum for the students to go and create that outcome."

Traditional assessment systems can't capture this kind of learning. A standardized test won't reveal whether students can synthesize interview data, pivot when community feedback contradicts their assumptions, or collaborate across differences to solve real problems. Yet these are precisely the competencies civic life requires.

Leon built a documentation system that tries to make civic learning visible and rigorous. Local Civics created assessment rubrics for each phase of community-engaged work: defining research questions, collecting evidence, ideating solutions, prototyping interventions, presenting findings. "We created a rubric across staff for every stage of this project," she says, with badges marking skills like community mapping, research design, and prototype development.

The system works because it recognizes collaboration as democratic practice. When students work in groups of four or five to identify community challenges, they're not just learning content; they're learning to navigate disagreement, incorporate diverse perspectives, and build collective solutions. "Students are tasked with finding an opportunity for impact in their community," Leon explains. This could mean strengthening something their community is really good at or addressing a challenge.

But documentation does more than prove learning happened. It shifts power dynamics. "One of the things that we're most proud of is that any student that's engaging with us, it's often the first time students are asked what their vision for community is," Leon says.  When that vision gets documented, assessed, and valued, when it counts toward graduation requirements and shows up in school data systems, it tells students their civic work matters.

The resistance Leon encounters isn't from students. "The kids are always game," she says. "They're like, ‘this is really cool. Are you sure this is school?’” The adults are the problem. Teachers worry about adding tasks to overloaded plates. Administrators question whether it's rigorous enough. "We sometimes have teachers that are like, am I responsible for doing my students' projects?" she says. 

This is where data infrastructure becomes essential. Local Civics built Pathlink, a technology platform that helps "schools and districts not only adopt that type of learning—project and inquiry based learning—but also integrate it into the systems of assessment that they're accountable to." The system tracks learning that happens outside classroom walls—in community gardens, at city council meetings, through partnerships with neighborhoods. 

This helps address a fundamental system challenge: variability of interest and ability. Do we want to always favor the kid who tests better on math or find ways to recognize those who are community leaders or caretakers? Doesn’t our democracy need that too? "Young people learn at different rates and have different insights... How do you create a system that actually might broadly map onto some of those learning moments?" she asks. Technology can handle the data, freeing educators to "actually guide and provide feedback for students through this learning process."

The payoff extends beyond individual competence. One West Harlem student wrote in an end-of-year survey: "I now look at Harlem differently. I noticed that we take care of the parks and places where young people can play... I never thought about that. I thought about all the negative things I saw in the community, but I couldn't see the positive."

This is collaboration as democratic practice—not just working together, but learning to see community assets, engage across difference, iterate toward solutions, and document the journey.